I don’t think I understand the question. People invented it?

It would never occur to me that Star Wars technology would need an explanation besides people inventing things over time. According to Lucas the story was originally going to be told by R2D2 when he was 2000 years old. It was going to be in our far future and our galaxy. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” was going to mean in R2D2’s past, told at a time when he was far away from here. They decided to drop the narration, and all that remained was that opening line - which has led people to think the whole story happened in the distant past in a galaxy other than ours. But this clears up a few little things like saying womp rats are a couple meters long.

In the Lord of the Rings, what is the explanation for swords and other metal goods?

At some point in the past, the arts of smelting, smithing, casting were discovered, refined over the centuries, different races and cultures advanced them in different ways, and eventually led to swords, mithril shirts, magic rings, etc.

Same thing with star wars, in-universe they have tens of thousands of years of history, I think canonically the old Republic was founded 25-or-so thousand years ago, if you go back that far in real earth human history and you’re pretty much at the point where a handful of weird wolves are starting to get comfortable enough with humans to let us start domesticating them.

And at that point in the star wars timeline, space travel and other advanced technology is already pretty well-established, so there’s probably at least that long again of incremental technological advancements leading up to that point.

Basically they just got a massive head-start on us

As far as how and where the technology is made, we get little glimpses of it here and there, droid factories on Geonosis, corelian shipyards, various mechanics, scrapyards, tinkerers, etc.

But that’s all just kind of backdrop. Star wars is a space opera adventure thing, not a mockumentary about the history of lightsabers and hyperspace drives, or a how-its-made for blaster pistols and gonk droids. It wouldn’t make sense for most star wars media to really go into depth about that kind of stuff and probably would piss people off if they did (not that most star wars fans don’t exist in a perpetual state of being angry at star wars about something anyway)

You wouldn’t go into a Fast and Furious movie expecting a whole history and mechanics lesson on automobiles, the movies are focusing on a handful of people who (race cars? Fight terrorists with cars? I really don’t know I’ve actually never seen any of them) there’s a whole in-universe world around them where all of those things happened/are happening out of sight and out of mind but it’s not directly relevant to the plot so it gets kind of glossed over, you can just assume most of the history and engineering stuff has been handled by people somewhere off-screen at some point in time.

Same with star wars, there’s untold trillions or more people scattered across millions of inhabited planets working dead-end jobs making widgets that have built on millennia of science and technology, but the stories focus on a handful of freedom fighters, smugglers, soldiers, warrior monks, etc. who mostly just use those things and probably don’t have much more idea how their hyperdrive works than you do about the alternator in your car.

By the time of the movies humans have had hyperspace travel for something like 20,000 years. Seems it stands to reason the trillions of sentient lifeforms working and communicating during that time would create some cool shit

A few years ago I’d have jokes about data ports being the same fitting as power sockets, but USB-C has ruined that

Didn’t one of the new movies have a whole thing about the mil-industrial complex?

Unless otherwise specified, my assumption is that laborers working for oligarchs made the tech

Same place any technology comes from I suppose.

Some of their technology is vastly ahead of ours, other technologies are way behind. The behind stuff is far more interesting. Comms in Star Wars is weird and anachronistic with other tech in the show. Getting clear signals for comms seems nearly impossible.

I also get a giggle out of tech used in the show only to drive plot: like how protagonists can scan ships for life forms but protagonists also only power down ships to evade the eye of a passing baddy ship.

The Incom Corporation, of course!